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This program will print the value 11, which is the length of the string "Hello World". Character strings are stored in an array of a data type called char. The end of a string is found by searching for the first null character in the array.

Note importantly that this length does *NOT* include the array entry for the trailing null byte required for the ending character of C strings. Thus, if you need to copy the C string, you need to allocate a space of strlen() + 1.

It is possible to write faster versions in C that examines full machine word rather than byte-by-byte. Hacker's Delight has given an algorithm that makes use of bitwise operations to detect if any of these bytes is nul ('\0'). The current FreeBSD implementation does this.[2]

Modern C compilers usually provide fast inline versions of strlen written in assembly, either using the bitwise operation technique or a special instruction provided by certain CISC processors. In addition, strlen of a quoted string constant is often optimized into a constant integer.